What's Better: 1 NVMe array 12x NVMe + 9x LFF array ... or use 2 servers: 1 NVMe and 1 LFF (spinning)

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TrumanHW

Active Member
Sep 16, 2018
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I'd love to find a unit which allowed a mixture of

SENARIO 1
- 6x NVMe in the rear
- 12x LFF in the front

- or -

SENARIO 2
1 system for NVMe (allows for special vDevs)
1 system for Rsync (allows for special vDevs + fail overs)

Feels like 1 system should be cheaper than 2, but maybe not ...
2 systems may have more points of failure... and would be louder.
I'd like to keep it on the cheaper end as the
- R730 series seem fast enough for spinning drives...
- any EPYC system would be more than enough PCIe lanes for the NVMe

I own an R730

is there a cheap way to make clones (backups) of all my data to my old T320 machines (as I'll be using ~45TB on the R730) and even that is going to be getting trimmed down to about 35TB which is less than the size of my T320 array

Thanks

Again, I'd like to get the best hardware at a good price as I'm not in a rush and I can afford to be patient and wait for a deal here.
 

itronin

Well-Known Member
Nov 24, 2018
1,234
793
113
Denver, Colorado
I'd love to find a unit which allowed a mixture of
...
is there a cheap way to make clones (backups) of all my data to my old T320 machines (as I'll be using ~45TB on the R730) and even that is going to be getting trimmed down to about 35TB which is less than the size of my T320 array
easiest way is zfs replication of your datasets/pools - assumes you are running ZFS on your T320. Initial sync may take a bit if your T320 is running spinners.

don't have enough information for use case or workload to comment on your other questions.

at the same time I think you answered the question yourself in your post Thanks comment :p
Easier to start with 1 and then split it out to two right?